Excel Workbook support, Office Online Server, and Windows Server 2019

[mjbernier]

We have a business need to host Excel workbooks alongside other published Power BI and Paginated (SSRS) reports on our Power BI Report Servers. We have tested Office Online Server (OOS) on one of our development servers and it works exactly as we need. The end users are excited to add this capability to make PBIRS a "one stop shop" for internal reports.

We have multiple business domains, and we plan to install one OOS instance per domain. However, one of the production servers we intend to use is running Windows Server 2019, and Microsoft does not appear to support OOS instances on a 2019 box. If this is the case, how can we provide Excel workbook support on PBIRS? A short term solution would be to stand up a separate 2016 server (which we'd rather not do), but even if we did that what happens to Excel support when 2016 reaches end-of-life?

[ponnusamy]

@mjbernier : Just curious , why did you not choose "Sharepoint" to host the files? Its scalable and can be controlled as you want. It integrates well with Power BI as well.

[mjbernier]

We use SharePoint Online, which is not supported as a data source for Power BI Report Server. Plus, we wanted to take advantage of the "one stop shopping" that Excel workbook integration provides to place all the reporting in a single location for consumers.